As you may have noticed, we have installed a new banner in celebration of this important milestone that Oppy has reached on this terrestrial day (15 Feb/1726 US Pacific Standard Time). Thanks to Emily for creating it, and apologies to all that I was not able to install it a bit better...will work on it some more when I get a chance, promise, first time doing this!

In any case, it's time to reflect on how far both she and we have come. Nobody--and I mean nobody--ever dreamed in their wildest that MER-B would be operating fourteen years after bouncing to the surface, into a hole-in-one filled with blueberries...it was magic, it's BEEN magic, the very best kind...the magic of discovery, the magic of yet another 'new Mars' unfolding before us every day.

Here's to the next five thousand!!!!

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A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.

92 sols for MER A if sent to Gusev100 sols for MER B if sent to Meridiani.

Tomorrow, we plan sols 5000 and 5001.

What’s the mood within the team to get to this point? Steve stopped a long time ago saying that Oppy could brake any time and that you have to plan sol by sol. I feel like, knowing it for sure, you don’t plan a sol as he could be the last. Any fear about global dust storm? Go Oppy, go

What’s the mood within the team to get to this point? Steve stopped a long time ago saying that Oppy could brake any time and that you have to plan sol by sol....

The mood in the room yesterday was quite giggly. I'll let Doug tell that story.

Regarding Oppy dying any minute, when I joined the team in 2004 I told myself I wanted to be the last person to leave the sequencing room after she stopped working. Now I'm getting worried she will outlast me! In 2004 we had flip phones, TV was analog, standard def, and displayed on a CRT (ahem, MER still uses CRT monitors but are finally been phased out). We do keep in mind she's an old lady but in general we do not operate as if she's dying any minute now. We are careful, we deal with her arthritic wheels and arm but science is still our goal. Mars will surely win, but Oppy is definitely a tough cookie.

Paolo

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Disclaimer: all opinions, ideas and information included here are my own,and should not be intended to represent opinion or policy of my employer.

To mark Sol 5000, the MER team asked Oppy to take a self-portrait... here's a VERY crudely- and hastily-assembled version of that self portrait... there'll be a much better version released by the MER team later! Huge congratulations to Doug and the whole team. A dream come true mate... a dream come true...

Thanks most of all to the entire MER team, some of whom are our members (RoverDriver & Deimos among them in addition to Doug) for giving us a new Mars every day for fourteen years. We've become accustomed to that marvel, which for those of us old enough to remember was an inconceivable dream back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and it may seem sometimes that your efforts are taken for granted, even ignored.

I've been thinking of an MER Selfie for ten years. Fortunately, Keri (TUL) and Ashley (RP1) who were also on shift on Thursday liked the idea.

The SOWG Chair for planning liked the idea. Infact, Aileen is the godmother of selfies - having advocated for the MSL MAHLI selfies from the beginning of MSL's mission at Gale.

Then the Mission Manager, Matt, went to Project Management, John....who got a final OK from Ray

We were actually going to f'ing do this.

So - I went hunting....had we ever downsampled MI images in flight? Ever? Turns out we have - ONCE - a long LONG time ago. And it looked awful. The compression parameters for the MI are different to those for the Nav/Hazcams. So I had to take a mild stab in the dark. I wasn't entirely sure how big the final data products would actually be - but I was fairly sure they would compress well, being so fuzzy. Hence - the 4x4 binning down to 256x256.

THEN we had the SOWG meeting....and the science team went from "Huh?" to "What?" to "Well if you're gonna do it - at least prioritize the images well enough so we don't have to do it again!"

Ashley got the arm sequence drafted pretty quickly - and we found that the RP planning tools don't actually model the MI field of view very well....infact, it's WAY off. So we were planning the motion between frames using an estimated MI field of view, and holding a piece of paper up to the screen. Ashley also had to battle the software stop on one end of the turret (hence we don't see the right end of the solar arrays).

John W as RP2 had to finish up and deliver the arm sequence. John realized we need to do that Navcam frame AFTER pointing the MI for the first selfie image, but BEFORE we actually took it - so that 1... the MI was looking at the mast and 2...The mast didn't move during the selfie sequence!

We went for 16 images, as 4x4 downsampled is 1/16th of an image - so the thought was were acquiring the equivalent of one MI image. Don't tell anyone, but we added an extra frame in the 4th row to get the end of the left front solar array.

We got word that MRO was in safe mode half way through the planning day. That always makes people nervous.

And then we waited. Friday, most of us were supposed to have the day off....but most of us went in anyway. Hallie was due to be an RP, but was released. Mike fired up a terminal window to watch the packets hit the ground. We gathered around his cube to watch it. Engineering data. Then thumbnails. No warning EVRs so everything SHOULD have gone well. Then lots of MI packets.

"What are you doing over there - we've got images" Hallie shouted.

I hit refresh in Maestro to see the images - and it filled up with tiny images. Unmistakable.....the top of the PMA right there in the thumbnails.

I'll confess....I had something in my eye. Hugs all round.

And before we even had time to realize what we had done - Hallie had them roughly mosaicked - and there it was - the whole thing.

Some of you might have seen me comment about this on twitter yesterday.... the idea that

1 Opportunity would eventually do it. 2 On sol 5000. and 3-I would be on shift to write the MI sequence to take the images.

NONE of that makes any sense.

The good news is that everyone seems to be happy and pleased with our little, fuzzy, hazy, black and white selfie. Who knows....maybe we'll get to try it again on Sol 6000

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